Where we we when this was happening? We missed the opportunity to walk into Anderson Cooper's hands and let him cop an unwitting feel.

Ugh. Regrets.

Apparently, while filming the secretive episode in Portugal, Cooper spent two hours on the water -- and the sun had a damaging effect on his light-colored eyes.

"I wake up in the middle of the night, and it feels like my eyes are on fire ... and I think, 'Oh, maybe I have sand in my eyes or something,'" he said. "Anyway, it turns out I have sunburned my eyeballs and I go blind. I went blind for 36 hours."

After going to the hospital, Cooper photographed himself (albeit ineptly since he was blind at the time) in his new eye patch, which wasn't quite as sexy as we imagined. We'd have preferred something a bit more swashbuckling.

"That's my new Match.com profile picture, by the way," Anderson joked. "I think that's going to really work for me."